receiving: the living water Andy Rock SCRIPTURE: MARK 16:1-8 Optional subtitle: Who will roll the stone away? BONUS WEEK 7 SERMON: EASTER

Transcription

1 SCRIPTURE: MARK 16:1-8 Andy Rock Optional subtitle: Who will roll the stone away? BONUS WEEK 7 SERMON: EASTER

2 Description This sermon was created for all those who are unsure about the message of grace. May the Lord bless you as you preach this Easter Sunday. Scripture Mark 16:1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus body. 2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb 3 and they asked each other, Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb? 4 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. 6 Don t be alarmed, he said. You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you. 8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

3 Sermon 1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus body. Let me stop right there at the word Sabbath, which places this story of Jesus s resurrection firmly in the history of the Jewish people. Sabbath is the day of rest for the Jewish people. The Sabbath people are God s people. God has covenanted with Israel; God makes a promise to be their God and for Israel to be God s people. This is a covenant a promise established by God and fulfilled by God. Israel s sin and rebellion against God did not nullify God s promise; rather their folly, just like ours, caused Israel great pain and increased their desire for God to bring deliverance and salvation. God promised to bring deliverance and salvation through one person; in Hebrew he is called The Messiah, and translated into Greek the word messiah is Christ. Mary Magdalene, the other Mary, and Salome all knew this Messiah story, and these women had many clues from Jesus that he identified himself as the Messiah, the promised Christ. Jesus name literally means God saves, but his crucifixion and death crushed that reality in their hearts and minds. It is possible that the other Mary mentioned in today s passage was Jesus mother. In any case, she knew the dangers and promises that always surrounded her son. She knew the promises God had made to her concerning him, that one day her heart would be pierced with sorrow, yet Jesus, her boy, would be the one who would forgive sins, bring peace on earth, and goodwill to all mankind. Yet in the numbness of grief, I doubt Mary could see beyond her sorrow to see what we can today. We can see that from the beginning, Jesus was constantly under the threat of death. Herod, king of Israel when Jesus was born, discovered a prophesied usurper to his throne was born in Bethlehem, so he murdered hundreds of little boys in that poor village in an attempt to protect his reign. Mary and Joseph fled to Egypt with Jesus, where they were under threat as foreigners. In Nazareth, Jesus grew up around the tumult and danger of nearby towns destroyed by Roman legions as the might of Rome stamped out Jewish revolts. When he was thirty years old, immediately after his baptism Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness for forty days, which is no small attack. For forty days Jesus faced and conquered hunger, thirst, and attack. But even then it did not stop. As soon as Jesus started his public ministry, religious leaders, pastors, and community leaders all worked against Jesus to entrap him, arrest him, and kill him. Jesus was just too dangerous, too popular, too radical, and too unconventional.

4 Why? Because from the beginning of his ministry, Jesus miraculously healed people, cast out demons, proclaimed God s kingdom, demonstrated his absolutely unique and intimate and preeminent relationship to our Heavenly Father as the Son of God. Yet Jesus had one focus to his mission: to go to Jerusalem and give his life as a ransom for us all, to die, and then to rise again from the dead in triumphant resurrection. His closest friends tried to persuade him to abandon this mission. Peter stood in front of him and contradicted the necessity of the cross; Jesus rebuked him, Get behind me Satan! You do not know the things of God! Judas betrayed him. His friends couldn t even stay awake and pray for him on his worst night. And then Jesus did what Mary and the rest of the disciples thought was unthinkable. Jesus walked willingly into the perils that had threatened him since his life began. Jesus went to the cross to die, not as a victim, but on his own terms with his Heavenly Father s mission of love and forgiveness for the entire human race. Yet to his friends and family, Jesus went to the cross to die and that s it. Timothy Keller writes of our passage today, Nobody is expecting a resurrection. If you were the Gospel writer Mark, trying to write a credible piece of fiction, and you have had Jesus saying repeatedly to his disciples that he would rise on the third day, wouldn t you have at least one disciple thinking this through after Jesus death and saying to the others, Hey, it s the third day. Maybe we ought to go take a look at Jesus s tomb. What can it hurt? That would only be reasonable. But nobody said anything like that [because] nobody was expecting there to be a resurrection. 1 So here are three women going to prepare the body of Jesus, whom they all believe is dead. 1 When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus body. 2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb 3 and they asked each other, Who will roll the stone away from the entrance of the tomb? This is a great question. How were they going to roll away an enormous rock that completely sealed the entrance to Jesus s tomb? In, part, that s our question. Practical questions like this are important; after all, we live in a world in which we have to get things done, and for the most part, we are extremely practical people. Pure physics means that these women knew they could not roll the stone away themselves.

5 Now, there are some of you who are here today who are not too sure about Jesus, nor are you too sure about the resurrection. What I am about to say is not directed primarily to you, although it might be helpful if you are considering Jesus. For many of you, this is not your first Easter at church. You have heard this story. And I want you to place yourselves right here with these three women. You might be them. What do I mean? I mean that despite the multiple times in Mark that Jesus taught and instructed about his impending crucifixion and resurrection, these women completely didn t get it. Despite the fact that one of them might even have been his mother, they missed it. They heard Jesus words, but for some reason, they couldn t or wouldn t or hadn t quite grasped what Jesus promised would happen: I will die and on the third day I will rise again. They are walking along the road to the tomb trying to figure out how to serve Jesus, assuming it s up to them to roll the stone away. When I say you might be them, what I mean is that in all your practicality as Christians and all your familiarity with Jesus, you might be missing the whole point. Like these women, you think your faith, your love and service to Jesus, is all up to you. Let me put it another way. All of us Christ followers at some point will either with our words or our actions say this: I am saved by God s grace; my salvation is a pure and complete gift. And now that I m saved, I have to keep myself in good standing with God with my behavior. If I m good, God will bless me. If I m bad, God will be angry. I get my slate wiped clean by asking forgiveness. Basically, we are like these women. We believe Jesus, and then when Jesus is gone, we think we re alone and our faith is all up to us. We exchange God s grace in for our feeble efforts, and it s so discouraging. Why? Because we fail, we have doubts, we get stuck in sin and addictions, the camp high wears off, the good feeling after church goes away, we mess up, our plans fail, loved ones die, we get sick, our prayers are feeble and infrequent, we can t figure out what the Bible means, and all of this spells failure for us. Faith becomes a grind. The equation we had, do good things and God will bless me doesn t actually work in real life. The forgiveness treadmill becomes so heavy. It s like, well, it s like Jesus isn t even alive and we re walking to his tomb wondering, How are we going to roll this stone away? Denial will be a powerful force for you right now. Let me help. Please turn to your neighbor and politely tell them, You re like one of these ladies.

6 But if Jesus has risen, if the resurrection is true, and if you consider yourself a Christian, then you know that, as Jerry Bridges writes, First, your debt of sin has been paid by the death of Christ. The love of God and the justice of God have been fully satisfied. The debt of our sins has been marked Paid in Full! (All say it.) God is satisfied, and so are we. We have peace with God, and we are delivered from all guilt and condemnation forever. Second, not only has the debt been fully paid, but there is no possibility of going into debt again. (Repeat this sentence.) Jesus paid the debt of all our sins: past, present, and future. As Paul said in Colossians 2:13, God forgave us all our sins. We don t have to start all over again and try to keep the slate clean. There is no more slate. As Stephen Brown wrote, God took our slate and he broke it in pieces and threw it away. This is true for our Christian lives as well. God is not keeping score, granting or withholding blessings on the basis of our performance. The score has already been permanently settled by Christ The entire Christian life is lived under the reign of God s grace. 2 Eugene Peterson puts it this way, Jesus resurrection, which took place without any help or comment from us, keeps us from attempting to take charge of our own development and growth. 3 4 But when they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had been rolled away. Shazam!!! 5 As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man dressed in a white robe sitting on the right side, and they were alarmed. 6 Don t be alarmed, he said. You are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who was crucified. He has risen! He is not here. See the place where they laid him. Now, if you re here today and you haven t quite made your mind up about Jesus, this next part is for you. You have your doubts, you have your reasons, and you now find yourself surrounded by a lot of strange people on Easter. First, let me say, thanks for coming. If Jesus really has done it if he truly is risen it means that this entire story is true. Jesus really is the Son of God, the true and perfect king. If the resurrection is true, then Jesus really did come to earth to die on the cross for us, and by trusting in what he has done there, we are spared from eternal judgment and ushered into the presence of God for all eternity. 4

7 This is not easy to accept. The story itself is a bit unbelievable. But to me it strikes a note not easily forgotten because it s the beginning to the story I ve always wanted. When I look at my life, I want it to be good. I don t want to look back on my life and think, Man, how come I could never heal from my parents divorce? How come I was ruled by bitterness for all those years? Why couldn t I get past my selfishness? How come I didn t give and love and laugh more? I m desperate for there to be some way in this life for evil to be overcome. But for many of us, the reality is that we don t see this happening. Sorrow and pain and death surround us, and we get nervous that this is all there is. Why is it so hard to face your own death or the death of loved ones? It s so hard because we think this broken world is the only world we re ever going to have. It s easy to feel as if this money is the only wealth we ll ever have, as if this body is the only body we ll ever have. But if Jesus is risen, then your future is so much more beautiful, and so much more certain, than that. 5 A Presbyterian pastor tells this story: Every Easter I think about Joni Eareckson Tada. She was in an accident when she was seventeen, and ever since she has been a quadriplegic, paralyzed from the neck down. While she was still trying to come to terms with this horrible accident, she would go to church in her wheelchair. The problem with being in a wheelchair, she found, was that at a certain point in her church s liturgy every Sunday the priest called everyone to kneel, which drove home to her the fact that she was stuck in a wheelchair. Once she was at a convention in which the speaker urged people to get down on their knees and pray. Everyone did except Joni. With everyone kneeling, I certainly stood out. And I couldn t stop the tears. But it wasn t because of self-pity. She was crying because the sight of hundreds of people on their knees before God was so beautiful: a picture of heaven. And then she continued weeping at another thought: Sitting there, I was reminded that in heaven I will be free to jump up, dance, kick, and do aerobics. And sometime before the guests are called to the banquet table at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, the first thing I plan to do on resurrected legs is to drop on grateful, glorified, knees. I will quietly kneel at the feet of Jesus. Then she adds: I, with shriveled, bent fingers, atrophied muscles, gnarled knees, and no feeling from the shoulders down, will one day have a new body, light, bright, and clothed in righteousness powerful and dazzling. Can you imagine the hope the resurrection gives someone who is spinal cord injured like me? 6

8 This life is not all there is. There is much more. Jesus resurrection is the guarantee that death does not have its sting, that hell does not have its victory, in this life or in the life to come. But more so, Jesus s crucifixion and resurrection are the events in history that forever point to the goodness and love and mercy of God for you. Many of the doubts and hesitations we have when it comes to God are really about the character and nature of God. The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus is proof that God loves you and accepts you and embraces you no matter who you are. Your doubts do not disqualify you from God. All your selfishness and apathy, all the ways in which you have hurt others it is all forgiven, especially the stuff you assume is unforgivable. On the cross all your sins are forgiven. And no matter what has been done to you, all the pain and rejection and hurt that has branded you as unworthy and unlovely on the cross Jesus joins you in your hurt and there he dies for you. And in his resurrection you are given his new life, his new body, and his pure heart. In the Gospel of John, Jesus puts it this way: I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even though they die. (John 11:25) 7 But go, tell his disciples and Peter, He is going ahead of you into Galilee. There you will see him, just as he told you. 8 Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid. I love it that Mark ends his gospel this way, with the women trembling, bewildered, and afraid, the sound of the angel s news ringing in their ears, Jesus is risen! (He is risen indeed!) The resurrection of Jesus turns everything upside down. God does that. Because Jesus has died for us and risen to new life, everything is different; everything has changed. Life with the risen Christ is totally different than we imagine. Like these women, we re bewildered because being a Christian is NOT about being religious. Being a Christian is totally opposed to a life in which we work and work and work to be moral, good, and perfect. That s just navel gazing. We are saved by Jesus not because we are perfect, but simply because God loves us. The gospel is the good news that we get to die to this old life of striving and navel gazing because God knows, and we know, it won t save us. The gospel is the good news that we are resurrected into the new reality that Christ is our life, that we are loved and affirmed and being recreated into the person we were always meant to be by Jesus, not by us.

9 We tremble because the crucifixion and resurrection means that we are free to lose. We are free to fail, to be ordinary. We don t have to measure up to expectations. Our strength is to admit we are weak. And this scares us. But it also frees us. In Jesus my identity is secure, which frees me to give everything I have to God for his will and purposes because everything I have is secure in Jesus. 7 When we trust Jesus, he calls us to follow him, which means we are called to die with him so that we might be raised with him. To die with Christ means that we must be ruthless in disowning all our efforts to roll the stone away ourselves. All our selfcenteredness, all our self worship, all our efforts to secure blessings from God by our good behavior, and all our fear of losing God s blessings because we fall: It all must die. This is terrifying. Resurrection is terrifying because you have to die first. To be raised with Jesus means that we must be fearless in trusting God. God is good. God will never leave you nor abandon you. Jesus proves this on the cross. To be raised with Jesus means that we must be fearless in affirming our worth and status before God. Why? Because we are adopted and redeemed by God, forever made new and pure through Jesus crucifixion and resurrection. There is no room for self-hatred or selfloathing in the gospel. If we were ever in doubt about our self worth, Jesus proves that we are irreplaceable and eternally loved; he died for you and is risen for you. So, in the end, it doesn t matter if this is your first Easter in church or if you ve been here for fifty years. All of us, every one of us, must make a decision today in our hearts and minds to trust Jesus. I invite you: Trust and rest in the sure fact that you are saved by God s love because Jesus chose to die in your place. Trust and rest and joyfully celebrate that in his resurrection Jesus has defeated death, and his life and hope and peace are forever yours. Maybe it s even simpler this way: Jesus plus nothing equals everything. Everything minus Jesus equals nothing. 8 Jesus is Risen!

10 1 Keller, Timothy (2011). King s Cross: The story of the world in the life of Jesus, Dutton, New York, p Bridges, Jerry (2008). Transforming Grace: Living confidently in God s unfailing love, NavPress, Colorado Springs, pp. 20, Peterson, Eugene H. (2010). Practice Resurrection: A conversation on growing up in Christ, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, p. 8. The entire quote, which is brilliant, goes like this: The resurrection of Jesus establishes the condition in which we live and mature in the Christian life and carry on this conversation: Jesus alive and present. Jesus resurrection, which took place without any help or comment from us, keeps us from attempting to take charge of our own development and growth. Frequent meditation of Jesus resurrection the huge mystery of it, the unprecedented energies flowing from it prevents us from reducing the language of our conversation to what we can define or control. Practice resurrection, a phrase from Wendell Berry, strikes just the right note. We live our lives in the practice of what we do not originate and cannot anticipate. When we practice resurrection, we continuously enter into what is more than we are. When we practice resurrection, we keep company with Jesus, alive and present, who know where we are going better than we do, which is always from glory unto glory. 4 Timothy Keller, King s Cross, p Who else? Timothy Keller, King s Cross. As I ve always said, competent plagiarism is better than incompetent creativity. 6 Timothy Keller, King s Cross, pp. 222, Stott, John (2006). The Cross of Christ, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove, p We not only have been created in God s image, but re-created in it. God s gracious work in us resurrection is essentially recreation This means that our mind, our character, and our relationships are all being renewed Becoming a Christian is a transforming experience. By changing us, it also changes our self-image. We now have much more to affirm, not boastfully but gratefully The ultimate basis for our positive self-image must be in God s acceptance of us. 8 Tully Tchividjian, grandson of Billy Graham, quoted in an Acts 2:9 conference from the Resurgence podcast.